Frente a la vida / Facing Life is an exhibition of murals and ceramic paintings by artist Victoria Martinez that responds to the life and work of Peruvian poet and activist Magda Portal (1900–1989). Drawing on Portal’s first book of poetry, Una esperanza i el mar (Hope and the Sea, 1927), Martinez’s paintings in Frente a la vida / Facing Life feature motifs borrowed from Portal’s body of work. Rivers, tears, and the sea represent rupture and rebirth, plurality and unity, captivity and independence. Washing the wall with a painted panorama and flooding the gallery windows with fields of color, Martinez heightens the permeability of the Poetry Foundation’s architecture, transforming it into an expressive, abstracted terrain.
One mural, Alegría del campo, alegría del cielo, alegría del mar (Joy of the Fields, Joy of the Sky, Joy of the Sea, 2025), depicts a slope that swells and converges with the gray of forbidding clouds. The intersection of these simple geometries suggests the elemental entwinement of opposing forces—a parallel to Portal’s “alegre tristeza” (“joyous sadness”).
Serafín, Magda, Gloria (2025) coats the windows with blue vinyl, submerging sunlight in liquid transparency. Along the mural’s upper edge, three intersecting circles hover, standing in for the poet, her lover Serafín Delmar (a pseudonym that translates to “angel of the sea”), and her daughter Gloria. This emblematic geometry repeats across the exhibition, representing transformation and generational cycles.
Hung among these murals, Martinez’s earthenware paintings blur body and natural world: the spiraling arms of rivers reaching out to sea also silhouette sensual contours that might be breasts or buttocks; the lidded apertures of swimming eyes recall the splitting, ripened husks of seeds.
Bridging the near-century between today and the publication of Una esperanza i el mar, Martinez memorializes Portal’s vital work and invites us to reflect upon change and that which endures.
VICTORIA MARTINEZ is an interdisciplinary artist who conserves culture through painting, site-specific installation, and mixed-media fiber projects.
MAGDA PORTAL An award-winning writer, Portal was a founder of Peru’s American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA). Entangling her political and poetic practices, she advocated a radical literature centered on Indigenous peoples and the working class, in whom she saw the roots of Latin American cultural identity. Her elegiac writing captures life’s dualities, integrating the austerity of Peru under authoritarian rule with her own internal landscape—one shaped as much by the hardships of deportation and incarceration as by the embodied ecstasies and anguishes of motherhood and romantic love.
Join us for a reception and artist talk to celebrate the opening of the exhibition Frente a la vida / Facing Life. The event will feature a conversation between writer Nicole Kaack and artist Victoria Martinez on September 20th, beginning at 2 PM, followed by a reception.